Now, remember, these costs are the averages for all colleges and universities in the country, and for many of these, to paraphrase Paul Fussell, the resemblance to an actual institution of higher learning is purely architectural.

The UNC Board of Trustees wants to kick tuition up by $200 a year and student fees by $50 (for in-state students.) For those of you doing the math at home, that's a 5.6% increase (about half the national average for public institutions, I cannot help adding.)

Still with me? Okay. Now factor in:

UNC is on everybody's short list of the best public universities in the nation. Even when compared with private universities it always shows up in the "most selective" ranks and near the top of the overall heap.

(Okay, my wife, the Harvard grad, is entitled to look down her nose at me a little, but I ask you - when's the last time Harvard had an NCAA Men's Basketball team in serious contention in the post-season? That's right: Never.)In sum:

The (heavily taxpayer-subsidized) tuition and fees at UNC are an incredible bargain, maybe one of the Best Buys available today in higher education, particularly for in-state residents.

(Try taking your $4450 and change up the road to Duke University and see how far it gets you.)

We all think we can identify bullshit. We know when we are talking bullshit ourselves, and we have all been guilty of it at times, in the pub or the pulpit, though some of us produce more than others... But what is bullshit? The concept is universally recognised, yet as Professor Frankfurt writes, "the most basic and preliminary questions about bullshit remain, after all, not only unanswered but unasked."

He begins, like all good philosophers, by defining what bullshit is not. Bullshit is dishonest, yet it is not necessarily mendacious. The bullshit artist may not tell you the truth (though he may do so inadvertently), but he is not deliberately lying. This is because bullshit cares nothing for truth or falsehood, accuracy or error, and that is its force and danger.

Both the liar and the honest man must have regard for truth, the former to subvert it and the latter to propagate it. Bullshit, by contrast, is fundamentally unconcerned with truth or falsehood, but only with appearance, effect and persuasion, however transitory... The essence of bullshit is getting away with it, with persuading listeners or readers of a sincerity that is, by definition, phoney. The bullshit artist simply does not care about truth: “He pays no attention to it at all,” writes Professor Frankfurt. “By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.”

The GeoURL.org server is back on line (with nearly 150,000 existing database entries still intact.) GeoURL is a geographic database for weblogs; it allows you to enter a site's URL and see all of its "neighbors."

26 February 2005

You never know what you're going to learn when you check in with Metafilter for the day.

Here's a little gem that surfaced in a thread on Danica McKellar (she played Winnie on "The Wonder Years" and has a math degree, endearing her to geeks-of-a-certain-age):

As a member of the Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan, and as a session guitarist for Carly Simon, Bryan Adams, Ringo Starr and many others, Jeff "Skunk" Baxter has been a clandestine rock and roll hero since the '70s. Now, as a specialist in terrorism, missile defense and chemical and biological warfare, he's also a covert hero for the U.S. military.

He's currently working for the Department of Defense as an adviser to the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization and has also served as a top military adviser for numerous congressmen and senators.

Now, if you're like me, and you start free-associating on "2,000 ton pile of smoldering cowshit," you're gonna think about these guys (or, to be fair, these guys.) Spontaneous combustion in a feedlot compost heap isn't the first thing that springs to mind.

One thing's for sure: the residents of Milford, Nebraska are breathing easier tonight.

("Deadwood" would be the best show on television were it not for a sister series on HBO, "The Wire." If "The Wire" comes back for another season and TWoP starts covering it, too, my head might explode.)

This story, unfortunately, is more of the same: Arash Sigarchi and Mojtaba Saminejad are in prison in Iran for speaking their minds, in defiance of the authorities. In fact, Arash and Mojtaba apparently angered the mullahs by (among other things) protesting an earlier clampdown on prominent Iranian bloggers.

What can you do about it, halfway around the world from where these unfortunate men are being unjustly imprisoned? In addition to blogging about the situation, the Committee has some suggestions:

If you are in the United States, contact either the Representative at the Iranian Interest Section of the Pakistani Embassy or the Ambassador to Iran’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations. (Iran has no embassy in the United States.) Here is the contact information.

21 February 2005

No one really knows why, though he had been in declining health for years now, and his legendary substance (ab)use can't have helped much. I certainly don't know, but I suspect that the indignity of incipient old age and coping with an increasingly failing physical frame just became too much for him.

I'll have more to say about Hunter and his impact on my life after I digest the news.

19 February 2005

GeoURL was a pretty cool web service. You embedded your latitude and longitude information into your web site or blog's metatags, registered with their server, and then you could run a search to locate all the sites in their database that were geographically close to you.

Unfortunately, the GeoURL server has been down since sometime last fall.

Well, the GeoURL service is back. In fact, not only is it back, it now looks like there may be two competing GeoURL services!

The site at geourl.org (the old URL) is still showing as "going live Real Soon Now," but geourl.info is up and running. The sites appear to be entirely separate efforts.

To all visitors of The Somerville Gates: There are no official opening events. There are no invitations. There are no tickets. This work of art is FREE and for all to enjoy, the same as all of our previous projects. If anyone tries to sell you a ticket, do not buy it. This would be an act of fraud because no tickets are needed.

18 February 2005

An indignant Israeli is suing a pet shop that he says sold him a dyingparrot, reports the Ma'ariv newspaper. Itzik Simowitz of the southerncity of Beersheba contends the shop cheated him because theGalerita-type cockatoo not only failed to utter a word when he got ithome, but was also extremely ill. Mr. Simowitz adds that the shopowner assured him the parrot was not ill but merely needed time toadjust to its new environment.

17 February 2005

Mister Gato loves cardboard boxes. Whenever the FreshDirect guys bring groceries, or the UPS man makes a delivery, he waits for us to unpack and then happily investigates the empty cardboard boxes one by one, often picking one to settle into for a brief nap, or equally often, ritually sharpening his claws on the side of each box...

The other day we were breaking down a bunch of boxes for recycling, which distressed Mr. G. no end. All of those beautiful 3-D boxes being converted into 2-D cardboard flats! The horror!

He's a resourceful cat, though. He took custody of one of the smaller boxes (a recent conveyance for my latest shipment of O'Reilly books), jammed his head and front paws into one open end and wrestled the box back to "life."

Throughout his life, May was closely identified with his first-person narrator and alter ego, Old Shatterhand -so called because he could kill a man with the blow of his fist. Ironically, May never set foot upon the American plains and largely researched his subject in German prison libraries while serving time for, among other things, fraud and impersonating a police officer. Despite, or perhaps because of this, May's stories continue to be immensely popular. His works have sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, far more than any other single German author, including Goethe, Hesse and Mann, and his fans have included the likes of Einstein, Schweitzer, and even Hitler.

May's existence answers a question that has puzzled me for over twenty years. In my youth, I did a NOLS course out in the Rockies, and when we came down out of the hills and went out on the town in beautiful, cosmopolitan Lander, Wyoming, we were surrounded by excited German tourists in Stetsons and very expensive cowboy boots, who were apparently either on their way to, or on their way back from, a nearby dude ranch. And now I know why.

15 February 2005

Unfortunately, his magnum opus bears a title that the Grey Lady is too prissy to print without redaction: "On Bullshit."

Excerpt from the introduction:

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry.

At $9, this new Princeton University Press title is too inviting to pass up. I've just ordered it... look for a review in this space soon.

The Jon Frum movement appeared for the first time in the 1940s in the New Hebrides (as Vanuatu was called at the time). At that time some 300,000 American troops established themselves in Vanuatu. The islanders were impressed both by the egalitarianism of the Americans and their obvious wealth and power. This led them to conflate perceived benefactors such as Uncle Sam, Santa Claus and John the Baptist into a mythic figure called Jon Frum, who would empower the island peoples by giving them cargo wealth. The power of Jon Frum appeared to be confirmed by the post-war influx of tourists to the region, who brought with them a degree of material prosperity to the islands. The cult is still active today. The Jon Frum movement also has its own political party, led by Song Keaspai.

The followers believe that Jon Frum will come back on February 15th, which is celebrated annually as Jon Frum Day. The most sacred symbol of the Jon Frum movement is a red cross. On Jon Frum day prayers and flowers are offered at the cross. In addition to this members involve themselves in a flag raising ceremony and a military parade in which they carry rifles made of bamboo.

By adamantly refusing to do anything to improve energy conservation in America, or to phase in a $1-a-gallon gasoline tax on American drivers, or to demand increased mileage from Detroit's automakers, or to develop a crash program for renewable sources of energy, the Bush team is - as others have noted - financing both sides of the war on terrorism. We are financing the U.S. armed forces with our tax dollars, and, through our profligate use of energy, we are generating huge windfall profits for Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan, where the cash is used to insulate the regimes from any pressure to open up their economies, liberate their women or modernize their schools, and where it ends up instead financing madrassas, mosques and militants fundamentally opposed to the progressive, pluralistic agenda America is trying to promote. Now how smart is that?

Did you ever wonder what those increasingly-ubiquitous Chinese character tattoos actually mean?

The meaning may be much more (or less) than meets the eye. Over at Hanzi Smatter, a site devoted to documenting the misuse and abuse of Chinese characters in Western culture, Tian helpfully breaks it down for you, with often-hilarious examples of cross-cultural miscommunication.

I am not to be an ass of job for you.I am a big oaf but I say ow ow owAnd yet I yen for you to bed meI am not to be an ass of job for youI go for a big way, my toe is all ow ow owAnd yet I yen for you to bed me

I got no E.D.Am I not an S.O.B.?I got the do-re-mi.I can see O.K.

I am not to be an ass of job for you.We go to my hut, dim out the sun.Din on the FM setHey, I ask you, gal, to bed me.

I got no E.D.Am I not an S.O.B?I got the do-re-mi.I can see O.K.

Oh, lil' sis,not bad to the eye, not bad to the eye, not bad to the eye, not bad to the eye, gal.You are not bad to the eye, not bad to the eye, gal.Lil' gal, let me bed you, O.K.?

Barry Lawing remembers the first time his dad took him to a Wake Forest game, nearly four decades ago. He's been hooked on Atlantic Coast Conference basketball since.

Now a history instructor at Forsyth Technical Community College, Lawing has found a way to bring that passion to academia. For the second straight winter, he is teaching a class on the league's highest-profile sport, a veritable ACC History 101 featuring everything from old game footage to guest lecturers, some better known for scoring than speechmaking.

There has not been a public sale of ACC Tournament tickets since 1966, and all tournaments since then have sold out in advance. The tickets are equally distributed among the 11 member institutions. Ticket sale distribution is handled on a school-by-school basis. For more information on purchasing ACC Tournament tickets, please contact one of our 11 member institutions.

Christo groupies from around the world are descending on New York for the event. Already, the artsy-fartsy quotient at neighborhood restaurants and bars is nearing, ahem, Orange Alert level. Pretty soon you won't be able to buy a spare beret for love nor money.

I've never thought much of Christo's "art," but I do admire the business acumen of anyone who can make a living by, e.g., wrapping buildings in huge swaths of fabric, paying for it with other people's money, and then selling signed photos and lithographs of the events both before and after the fact...

In the best enrevanche tradition: if it's Thursday, this must be Mister Gato.

Writing a fan letter to the designers at Herman Miller has been on my to-do list for quite some time now. One of the only relics left from my days toiling in the dot-com vineyards, other than some good friends and business contacts, and some worthless stock, is my fondness for Aeron chairs.

Putting in a long day at work without suffering lower back pain: pure genius. (As one edges cautiously into early middle age, these things become increasingly important.)

We just had to have one for the apartment, especially when my wife was setting up a home office for her freelance writing business. So we marched down to Sam Flax and put our money on the counter.

It's one of the best furniture investments we ever made. Recent developments, however, have complicated the chair situation somewhat:

Actually, this is mychair.

My fan letter would now read something like this:

Dear Herman,

Love those Aeron chairs. They are the sturdiest things I've ever seen. Not only do they support the weight of an oversized blogging redneck, but when my irascible tomcat tries to sharpen his claws on the plastic mesh, he is incapable of harming it.

Keep up the good work. And would you please consider making a cat-sized Aeron so I can have mine back?

Best regards,

Barry

Gato is proprietary about a number of things in our apartment, not just the desk chair. Here, he guards my wife's knitting bag on the couch... because, you know, that's where the yarn is. And he takes his yarn very seriously.

09 February 2005

Business 2.0 (one of my favorite tech industry rags) presents the 101 Dumbest Moments in Business, 2004 Edition. (Note: some content on this site requires a very affordable and well-worth-it subscription, but I logged out and tested it, and the first several pages, at least, of this article apparently do not.)

Personal favorite:

19. Now wipe your tears and go sit on that block of ice."I give Gene permission to bust my behind any way he sees fit."—Agreement given to female workers at Tasty Flavors Sno Biz in Red Bank, Tenn. The owner of the shaved ice operation is charged in November with two counts of sexual battery after it dawns on a pair of 19-year-old ex-employees that spankings are not a professionally sanctioned management tool.

Signs that the economy is improving: unsolicited come-ons from technical recruiters.

I've been off the market for some time now, but old copies of my resume are still floating around out there.

Based on some of the evidence I've recently seen, however, during the recent tech slump we apparently lost a number of good, professional recruiters... and in their place, now that things are gearing up again, we've got people who can apparently neither read nor write.

Case in point: yesterday, I received a semi-coherent message from a recruiter asking me to apply for a job I am not remotely qualified for. I am not sure whether she actually read my resume (I'm betting she didn't) but given the literacy level of her query letter, who knows?

Her note to me included these gems:

Also I would like to have this information send to me via email.

Details to fill

Immigration status/green card/citizen

Current salary that u can prove

Current bonus that u can prove

My response, with identifying information redacted to protect the clueless:

Hi, (clueless recruiter.)

Thanks for thinking of me with respect to this job opening.

Unfortunately, since I'm not a programmer, and have no experience with (a whole bunch of stuff I know nothing about) or really any of the technologies that are listed in the job requirements other than Office and Visio, I don't think I would be a very good fit for this employer, and thus I think I'll pass.

I am a pretty good technical writer and editor, however, and would like to offer you some suggestions about how to improve your query letter.

In a business letter (and that includes e-mails) it is best to use standard written English, in order to sound and appear professional and to avoid misunderstandings. You also want to proofread carefully, and check both spelling and grammar, before sending out an e-mail.

So, for example, "current salary that u can prove" is wrong for a couple of reasons.

First, it uses "u" instead of "you," which is okay when sending text messages to a friend on a cell phone (or quoting hip-hop lyrics) but should be avoided in the business world; second, it rather belligerently implies that you think you're addressing someone who would lie, given half a chance.

I am sure that you meant to be neither insulting nor flippant, but many readers might read it that way.

Here is one way to re-write the message that you sent me that would avoid these kinds of problems.

*****

Hi, (candidate's name here.)

Your resume came up as a potential match to a position that we're actively recruiting for.

(Insert brief summary of position here.)

If you're interested, point your browser to

(URL here)

for more information.

If you'd like to apply for the job, you can submit your information at the link above, or, if you'd prefer, you can send me your resume (as an attached Microsoft Word document, please) by return e-mail.

When submitting your information, please be sure to include the following:

[Fired journalist Rachel Mosteller] learned a valuable lesson: If you have a job, blog at your own risk - "unless you're writing recipes and about how much you love puppies and kittens," Ms. Mosteller says.

Okay, that puppy and kitten stuff is hitting a little close to home here, and I have so far refrained from posting my cornbread and pound cake recipes (any requests?) but she's got a pretty good point: if you go out on a limb in your blog, and especially if you blog about work, don't be surprised if there are consequences to be paid.

The CSM article was okay, but even a cursory glance around the blogosphere reveals that blog-related firings have been a trend for some time now. PopeMark, over at The Papal Bull, has compiled a list of fired bloggers (see also the update here) going back a couple of years.

Somehow, the author of the CSM story failed to notice and interview Heather Armstrong, who blogs at Dooce. Heather's firing a few years back gave rise to the term "dooced," meaning "to be fired for blogging."

Generally speaking, I am not too impressed by anonymous blogging; I made the decision to go "open kimono" when I started my blog, and I tend to have more respect for people who are willing to sign their name to their opinions.

But if you're going to blog about work, both anonymity and a modicum of active deception about the details you share with your readers would seem to be prudent.

Just time for a quick post on the way out the door, but Google Maps is now in public beta, and it's very cool.

First, the quality of the online maps on offer is really excellent, a cut above what I've seen elsewhere. Their street maps of New York City helpfully indicate major streets by highlighting them in yellow, for instance. (See, for instance, my immediate neighborhood.)

Second, Google Maps not only understands standard location and directions queries, it also understands queries like "hotels near LGA" (or other airport code, obviously) and "restaurants near 100 Main St, yourtown, yourstate" (or, even more specifically, "pizza near 100 main st...")

In 2001, 1.458 million American families filed for bankruptcy. To investigate medical contributors to bankruptcy, we surveyed 1,771 personal bankruptcy filers in five federal courts and subsequently completed in-depth interviews with 931 of them. About half cited medical causes, which indicates that 1.9–2.2 million Americans (filers plus dependents) experienced medical bankruptcy. Among those whose illnesses led to bankruptcy, out-of-pocket costs averaged $11,854 since the start of illness; 75.7 percent had insurance at the onset of illness.Medical debtors were 42 percent more likely than other debtors to experience lapses in coverage. Even middle-class insured families often fall prey to financial catastrophe when sick.

Since the vast majority of insured Americans get their medical coverage through their jobs, it can (and does) disappear if you become too sick to work and your COBRA coverage (assuming you can afford it in the first place if you're not working) runs out.

And even with insurance coverage, a serious illness can leave you thousands of dollars in the hole, from co-payments, deductibles, and non-covered expenses.

When my wife got sick several years ago (thank God, she's doing just fine now) we had several thousand dollars in bills for medically necessary treatment that the insurance companies--and we had very good insurance at the time--simply refused to cover.

My parents, God bless them, have been dealing with chronic illnesses and insurance companies for years, and I have learned a little something by watching them operate. I have never been one to take a refusal from some pissant low-level insurance company clerk as a definitive answer, and was ultimately able to cajole and browbeat the insurer into covering a not-insubstantial fraction of the unpaid amounts, but for the most part we just had to grit our teeth and cut some checks. It took some time, but everybody got paid. And we were damned lucky to be able to do that.

Even more charming was what happened to us about a year later; my wife was freelancing, and I was between staff jobs, doing some freelancing myself; we were both getting insurance coverage through a COBRA policy from my former employer, which would easily tide us over, we thought, until one of us slid into the next employer-provided insurance policy.

Until the day we found out that my sleazy former employer had (quite illegally) stopped sending in COBRA payments to the insurance company. Carrie went to the pharmacy to pick up some prescriptions, and discovered, at the cash register at Duane Reade, that we were utterly without insurance coverage.

Let me tell you, that's a scary feeling. And there wasn't a damned thing we could do about it, other than scramble to find some kind of ruinously expensive individual insurance policy that would provide two people with somewhat checkered health histories a little dab of catastrophic health coverage. (We finally got a group policy through a freelancer's association that might have actually paid a pittance towards our care had one of us been hit by a bus or something.)

Lesson learned: Even with COBRA, health insurance "portability" and the like, the way we obtain and maintain health insurance in America is deeply broken. You can play by the rules, do the right thing, work hard at a good job with decent insurance, and still wind up getting badly burned if you get sick enough. Health coverage, as a practical matter, is precarious at best.

Strategies for partial mitigation and self-protection:

If you don't have access to employer-provided health care, join a fraternal or professional organization to get access to insurance at group rates.

If your employer or affinity group offers you additional disability coverage (short or long-term), bite the bullet and sign up now. Disability coverage by its nature is much harder to take away from you when you need it most.

Ditto long-term care/nursing home insurance, the premiums for which will be very affordable if you're young and in decent health.

We were a little surprised to discover that Bella is #31 on the list of most popular names. (Hey, over at Cityrag: Buddy is #5!) "Chow Fun," of course, isn't on the list.

The most common breed, obviously, is "mixed." No word on the relative position of Chows (they aren't in the top ten), but we've been seeing a lot of Chow puppies lately... I think that breed is going places.

A photograph posted on an Islamist Web site appears to be that of an action figure and not a U.S. soldier being held hostage.

Liam Cusack, the marketing coordinator for Dragon Models USA, said the figure pictured on the Web site is believed to be "Special Ops Cody," a military action figure the company manufactured in late 2003.

On the Islamist Web site, a group calling itself the Al Mujahedeen Brigade, posted a photograph of a man it claimed was a captured U.S. soldier named John Adam, and it threatened to behead him if Iraqi prisoners are not released by U.S. forces.

Staff Sgt. Nick Minecci of the U.S. military's press office in Baghdad told The Associated Press that "no units have reported anyone missing."

The photograph showed the figure against a black flag with white lettering reading, "God is great, there is no god but Allah." A U.S. military assault rifle was pointed at its head. It appears that "rifle" was part of the plastic weaponry that came with the action figure.

The chubby critter delivered the prediction after he was pulled from his burrow in an oak stump at 7:31 a.m. by a top-hatted handler, and his prediction was greeted by boos from the thousands in attendance.